Zuckerberg hasn’t been a guest lecture in many years. In autumn 2021, 106a had an enrollment of 650 kids split across 99 sections, so 6-7 students per section. They intentionally make sections especially small in the first intro class to support kids who do not have strong backgrounds, so they don’t feel discouraged due to be less prepared and have an opportunity to ask questions / get help in a more comfortable setting. The sections are also intended to support students from less represented backgrounds in CS (female or URMs). 106a is an intro survey class taken from a wide variety of students and a wide variety of intended majors, full of students with wildly varying CS backgrounds. CS classes for majors also have sections, but they generally aren’t as small. By that point, students are assumed to be on a more similar background.
Stanford used to offer a more rigorous/accelerated version that was intended for students with stronger backgrounds, but they dropped in 2019, perhaps due to low enrollment. Back when it was last offered in fall 2019, the relative enrollments were as follows. Enrollment in the accelerated class had been decreasing for years before then. When I took 106x, enrollment was far closer to 106a.
106A – 464 students split in 95 sections
106AX – 33 students split in 2 sections
Stanford is certainly not unique in having large enrollments in their intro CS class. For example, I’ve seen numbers in high hundreds for Harvard’s CS 50. CS 50x (HarvardX Online) shows 3,984,835 enrolled so far for fall 2022. Princeton was mentioned earlier in the thread and shows hundreds in their intro CS classes, as do numerous other colleges that rank high on the USNWR national list.
Highly selective private colleges tend to have a single class with a well known lecturer that is split up in to many sections for more personal attention. This format has advantages and disadvantages, but it leads to large class sizes for intro classes in popular majors. Students who prefer smaller intro survey class sizes without as many sections might favor LACs or colleges where their desired major is less popular.
Many Stanford CS classes are large. Not just the introductory classes. They have great TA resources and use them well. Many of the classes bring in well known industry faces - always fun.
Anyone who watched the last Spider-Man movie has now heard of MIT even if they didn’t before. It was a major plot point and the fictional head of admissions was a character.
Texas. My neighbors daughter graduated from Princeton and people still ask why didn’t she go to UT or TAMU instead of a school no one ever heard of lol
You mean to tell me that the people in your neck of the woods haven’t even heard of Princeton, Yale or Stanford? And that only some have heard of Harvard if they happened to watch the right movie?
One of USNWR more heavily weighted category is a survey in which administrators of colleges rank other colleges in academic quality on s scale of 1 = marginal to 5 = distinguished. However, in more recent years it’s become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Admins who choose to fill out the survey are not experts on all of the hundreds of colleges they rate. Instead many rate colleges high that are expected to rank high based on past USNWR rankings. I think many peoples’ opinions about college rankings are also largely based on expectations from USNWR-type rankings. For similar reasons, if a ranking comes out that does not put HYPSM on top, it’s often assumed to be an inaccurate ranking, so rankings makers often choose a formula that matches expectations, including USNWR.
An exception to this generalization is the first USNWR ranking in 1983. The first ranking was entirely based on a survey given to colleges asking them to rate peers. There was no previous USNWR ranking to influence ratings. The top 10 were:
Stanford
Harvard
Yale
Princeton
Berkeley
Chicago
Michigan
Cornell
Illinois
MIT
Some differences from current rankings are public research power houses did better, and many highly selective private colleges did worse. For example, Columbia didn’t do well enough to appear among ranked colleges in the first 2 surveys, and ranked #18 in the 3rd survey. It wasn’t until USNWR changed the formula to emphasize things correlated with endowment/wealth that Columbia appeared in top 10.
For an individual, such rankings are near meaningless. The arbitrary weightings used in the rankings formula will almost certainly not resemble the student’s individual values. And they will not be personalized for important things like cost after FA/scholarships, quality/existence of planned major, and location.
In Texas, those are Junior colleges. I’ve spent time in both Austin and College Station for work. I personally didn’t feel the vibe in Austin but to live in College Station is to live in a cult.
These people are SERIOUS for their aggies.
My company had a grand opening ceremony there (car dealership). Every speaker - the franchise owner, their kids, the mayor or city manager …everyone started with I’m so and so A&M class of xx. And then I forget the noise but some kind of grunt or something.
My company was totally overshadowed. I thought I was at an Aggie reunion. It turns out that’s every day living!!
Believe it or not, people do come from many different backgrounds. Add in cultural and generational considerations, perhaps heritage language considerations since Texas was mentioned, I am not that surprised. I’m definitely not surprised that the football powerhouses are considered the be all end all by some people.
A few years ago someone shared a link to which colleges chose which other colleges as their peers. I can’t seem to find it anymore. This IHE article is from 2012 but the link posted here was more recent than that.
No, it was a general plot of many universities. Each university’s name was in a circle and had lines radiating to the other university names that they identified as peers. You could see that, for example, Wash U considered Stanford and Rice peers but Stanford did not consider Wash U a peer.
